Pirate's Cove

On Friday, I posted an article featuring excerpts from a BBC story. Now, I was just over at ICECAP, and caught an interesting story, via Newsbusters, about the BBC changing the story.

The original 3rd paragraph read so:

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory.

From Newsbusters:

Yet, some time on Saturday after NewsBusters posted its piece at 12:22 PM, the third paragraph was mysteriously changed to this (emphasis added):

But this year’s temperatures would still be way above the average – and we would soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming induced by greenhouse gases.

I posted my article at 8:08am, and didn’t even consider going back to see if the BBC was playing games.

The average of what? Last 10 years? 20? 100? Since climate is inherently a long term effect, perhaps we could include the last 300 years. That would really mess it up, eh, especially since we were in the grips of the Little Ice Age back then.

As Noel Sheppard writes, that rewrite completely changes the tenor of the article and its original conclusions. Why am I not surprised it was done?

The 4th paragraph is completely changed, too. The original

But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend – and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.

Now:

The WMO points out that the decade from 1998 to 2007 was the warmest on record. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C.

Interesting that the temps haven’t changed, as pointed out in the story, since 1998, eh?

The story is also now pushing the discredited “2005 was the hottest year” bunk, too.

All the news that is fit to make up.